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Say what you want about Orange County schools — be it the high performing districts in Irvine, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach or struggling school districts in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Orange — but at least our educators have the common sense to know the Holocaust is not a subject for debate. In Rialto, educators are “revising” an assignment for middle school kids to have them “debate” the Holocaust. From KTLA’s website, this story and video.

And there is this story in the LA Times. From the Times story: The Rialto Unified School District has decided not to ask its eighth-grade students to argue whether the Holocaust happened after the assignment came under fire. The decision to revise the assignment came Monday after it drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which called it “grotesque” in a statement issued that same day. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based center, said the district’s “assignment mistakenly provides moral equivalency between history and bigotry.”

School administrators planned to “assure that any references to the Holocaust ‘not occurring’ would be stricken from any research assignment,” KTLA-TV reported, citing a district statement.

I think it’s high time for the administrators responsible for this assignment, teachers and school board members of RUSD to take a day off, with pay if necessary, and head to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Please go through the Anne Frank exhibit there now. Review the exhibits dealing with a horrific period in this planet’s history against Jews, Catholics, and Gays. Examine the photographs, the film footage, eyewitness accounts and physical evidence of this travesty against mankind and defend the assignment. If they still can make an argument that that the Holocaust never happened and was the result of propaganda, they should fired immediately.

In a statement released Monday, a spokeswoman for the Rialto Unified School District said an academic team was meeting to revise the assignment. Interim Superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam was set to talk with administrators to “assure that any references to the holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research assignments,” a statement from district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri read. “The holocaust should be taught in classrooms with sensitivity and profound consideration to the victims who endured the atrocities committed,” Jafri said. The English/Language Arts assignment, first reported Sunday by the San Bernardino Sun and provided to KTLA by the newspaper, asked students to write an argumentative essay about the Holocaust describing “whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.” Read more at http://ktla.com/2014/05/05/rialto-assignment-asking-to-students-to-question-holocaust-to-be-revised/#mpT8fr8W5YgawwUi.99

Where did the ‘Question the Holocaust’ assignment originate, – Common Core, – Interim Superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam (because the District was caught),
or both?

Cynthia mae CurranTA

May 11, 2014 at 11:07 am

Republican party doomed in Orange County. Let me give you the reasons, more conservatives types moved out of Orange County to states like Texas, Chuck Devore. Easterners now higher than southerners and mid westerners which means more Democrats, they can afford the higher price of housing. Irvine becomes a city of 300,000, Irvine is purplish. Santa Ana and Anaheim become a little more native born and the under 18 Hispanic population becomes adults more in the next decade. Finally, the Republicans do crappy now in large countries, Reagan won the county at 74 percent while Romeny only at 53 percent. . More people becoming independents which means they are a swing vote.

Sherree

May 11, 2014 at 1:07 pm

Holocaust denial is a form of bigotry, one that should be called out for what it is. Unfortunately, we live in an era where facts, history and science are opinion, up for discussion, leaving no benchmark for reasonable discourse.